Developing a Speech Recognition System for Recognizing Tonal Speech Signals Using a Convolutional Neural Network

Deep learning-based machine learning models have shown significant results in speech recognition and numerous vision-related tasks. The performance of the present speech-to-text model relies upon the hyperparameters used in this research work. In this research work, it is shown that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can model raw and tonal speech signals. Their performance is on par with existing recognition systems. This study extends the role of the CNN-based approach to robust and uncommon speech signals (tonal) using its own designed database for target research. The main objective of this research work was to develop a speech-to-text recognition system to recognize the tonal speech signals of Gurbani hymns using a CNN. Further, the CNN model, with six layers of 2DConv, 2DMax Pooling, and 256 dense layer units (Google’s TensorFlow service) was also used in this work, as well as Praat for speech segmentation. Feature extraction was enforced using the MFCC feature extraction technique, which extracts standard speech features and features of background music as well. Our study reveals that the CNN-based method for identifying tonal speech sentences and adding instrumental knowledge performs better than the existing and conventional approaches. The experimental results demonstrate the significant performance of the present CNN architecture by providing an 89.15% accuracy rate and a 10.56% WER for continuous and extensive vocabulary sentences of speech signals with different tones.